JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. – It’s been two weeks since University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball coach Matt McCall looked ahead at the upcoming stretch of competition and wondered out loud if any other conference in the country would put together a schedule causing a team to play seven games in 15 days.
Those two weeks are up, and the Mocs exited them relatively unscathed.
UTC went 6-1 in the busy run of Southern Conference competition, leaving just as it entered – in first place in the league standings with a 1.5-game lead over Furman, a two-game lead over Wofford and a 2.5-game lead over East Tennessee State University. The Mocs, who have four SoCon games remaining before tournament time, completed the seven-game stint with a win Saturday at ETSU.
“If you told me we’d go 6-1 in this span, and oh, by the way, we’d win at ETSU, at Mercer, and beat Furman and Wofford, I’d take it every time,” said McCall, a former Florida assistant who is in his first season at UTC.
UTC (23-4, 12-2), which completed sweeps of the season series with Wofford, ETSU and Mercer during the busy stretch, next faces Virginia Military Institute at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Mc Kenzie Arena.
Now it’s back to what has become a foreign place: the practice floor. The Mocs have had one day of actual practice (not preparation) since Jan. 30, when they started the seven-game run at Samford. McCall believes there is still plenty to work on before the SoCon tournament begins March 3 in Asheville, N.C.
“I’m excited about that,” he said in reference to the chance to return to practice. “There are some things we need to work on as a team, and our guys will be excited about that as well.”
Junior Tre’ McLean, who had a game-high 25 points and 11 rebounds against the Bucs on Saturday – two days after a surprising loss at Western Carolina – said the team is “still taking steps day by day.”
“We’re trying to get better,” he said Saturday. “We know where we want to go, and our finish line is in sight right now. Thursday was a lesson. We wish we could win them all, but we didn’t. It’s a lesson, and we came in, fixed those problems and came away with a win today.”
The presence of veterans on the roster likely helped the Mocs bounce back from their defeat.
After a slow start against the Bucs, UTC’s defense was suffocating, forcing the Bucs’ second-leading scorer, T.J. Cromer, into six points on 2-for-6 shooting. ETSU’s Ge’Lawn Guyn, the leading scorer in the conference, finished with 24 points, but he was 0-for-5 from 3-point range and missed a couple of key free throws down the stretch.
“We prepared for this. We’ve prepared all year for this,” UTC senior Dee Oldham said Saturday. “A wise man once told me that when things get rough, you rise to the level of your training. You don’t rise to the occasion or the moment you’re in, it’s about how you train up to that point, and we were prepared for today, we trained for it and we were ready.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.